Pride in Place: How can Britain revive its ‘Little Platoons’ and rebuild its social fabric?

How can Britain restore its sense of pride in place? Since Onward was founded in 2018, themes of community, place, localism, strengthening regional economies and boosting civil society have been core to our research on Levelling Up and beyond.

Onward was pioneering in seeking to measure the strength of Britain’s social fabric, finding that in too many places community strength has become frayed. With nearly four million Britons experiencing chronic loneliness, and ever more pressure for young people to move away from home, how can public policy further a renewal of civic participation, local pride and a shared experience of community?

This panel event is part of our series on the Future of Conservatism, Onward’s commission seeking to chart a course for the future of the British centre-right. With an expert panel of speakers including Minister of State for Housing, Lee Rowley, we will discuss how to level up left-behind communities and restore pride in place.

Talking Too Many don’t understand right good evening everybody thank you very very much indeed for coming to this next event in our onward future of conservatism event series thank you very much for joining us at the unheard club uh this evening thank you very much to unheard for

Facilitating us and uh welcome to all of you and to those of us who are uh those of you who are joining us um online um we’ve got a fantastic um panel uh this evening my name is Gavin rice by the way director of the future of conservatism

Project um at uh onward uh just on housekeeping we are expecting to be joined by Minister Lee Rowley uh but he is in the House of Commons right now uh driving reform taking Leo Bill uh through and there is voting we are hoping that he’s going to be able to

Join us um after that voting um is is complete um um I will go through our panel here um on my left we have um casy Bourne who uh is the police and crime commissioner for Sussex and is serving in her third term uh she was first

Elected in 2012 12 reelected in 2016 and 2021 is the lead of the apcc portfolio group on business crime and road safety um had a very successful career in business prior to entering politics um has done fantastic work on antisocial behavior um and on domestic abuse uh and

Many other um areas as well and we’re very glad that she’s able to join us here this evening uh on my right I have Nicholas Boy Smith who is chair of the office rep Place uh is the found director and now chair of the social Enterprise uh create streets uh and he

An influential writer on design uh planning and the history of towns and um cities absolutely fascinating mind on the whole subject of um of place and the built environment and uh very glad that you’re able to join us this evening um we have a substitution today uh John

Yates uh unfortunately is in hospital uh or is is not well so we wish him the very best he is alive he’s been texting us so we hope it’s it’s nothing to last texed you the last time he Tex us he was alive U so obviously we we wish him well

Um uh as a last minute uh stand in um we are joined by our own deputy director at onward Adam hawksby on my uh on the far right on the end there uh but Adam does bring a particular hat to this which is that he is the chair of the government’s

Towns unit uh and in addition to the work that he’s done uh on this topic especially leveling up through onward um he has been going up and down the country over the last few weeks visiting many towns up and down the country getting experience of communities um on the front line uh and

So hopefully we’ll have some really interesting um concrete examples uh and Nuggets of what he’s been seeing um throughout um throughout this country um so we will get started then we’ll hear from each speaker we’ll have a little bit of discussion and then we’ll go to some audience Q&A um afterwards um the

Theme of place is absolutely Central to conservatism um was it Lord Willits we were discussing earlier um said that conservatism is about roots and about wings um and historically conservatives have uh placed value on both um there’s a degree to which recently we have talked more about wings about aspiration

Uh about meritocracy uh about uh achievement and all these excellent things that are very important but perhaps we’ve spoken less about Roots about um connectedness about belonging um about relationships and those things that we know as conservatives um really make life um worth living onward has a

Very fine pedigree um on this topic um one of its seminal reports the politics of belonging which uh some of you may be familiar with I think really sort to recapture and put back on the agenda this idea of a conservatism that pays more attention to um themes of community

Uh of place of security both in a social and in an an economic sense but also sorts a shine a light on those communities within our country that perhaps feel as though and in some cases have um been left behind so this evening we’re going to talk about um uh this

Subject of um place from a variety um of angles and we’ve got some excellent expertise um here today um Nicholas I’m going to start with you um if I may so you’ve done fantastic work at um create streets looking at the way in which we can rejuvenate Place uh and embolden

Placemaking um uh in this country with a particular focus on on um the built environment on Aesthetics and how that interacts with Community um can you talk to us about how you think we can have a a revolution and a renovation in place in this country thank you thank you very

Much thank you all for coming um other than the people in the front row very NAU stand there as well the first time I uh gave a talk great Street someone said I needed more numbers so the numbers I’m going to have I’m going to have one key word which is in fact

Place uh two paradoxes three problems four um arguments and and uh and five proposals um I’ve actually quite rarely for me I’ve prepared what I’m going to say so whether that’s bad news or good news I’ll let you judge in after the next half hour but no sorry that’s um um

I’d like to start I man if you’ll forgive me with a one of my favorite quotations which is from a weak historian uh perhaps the last the great weak story it’s not a Tory uh Jim travelan who wrote In His introduction to the social history of England that

The Poetry of History The Poetry of History he wrote lies in the Quasi miraculous fact that once on this earth once on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women as actual as we are today thinking their own thoughts swayed by their own passions but now all

Gone one generation Vanishing after another gone as utterly as we shall shortly all be gone as ghosts at quro there are interwoven themes ladies and gentlemen I think in that quotation of place yes but of Civility of the Sacred of communion with the past and with the

Future um which I think go to quite a heart of of essentially what we perhaps talking about um this evening um which i’ just perhaps like to to unpack for you uh the first of my paradoxes is that we have a very place-based political

System all MPS uh you know sit for uh a constituency they’re physically based and yet over the last I’m not sure it’s generation or a bit more than generation to talk about place as something that matters to our lives to the nature of our interactions with our fellow men and

Women has been become completely devalued until I’d argue last few years but hopefully we we are leading a bit of Renaissance in that when first propos to set up great streets I I spoke to a friend of mine who’s now very senior uh member of the government um and he basic

Said no one L what care about that um they’ll all laugh but I mean to some degree I say Well they’re not they’re not laughing now to some degree we are talking about place which I’m pleased about um so those of you know you won’t

Be surprised to hear I make the case for place as pass as one of the roads back to the little platoons and to to interacting well with uh our fellow men and women to Civility and to communion um I think there are four key reasons

For that uh the first if you like is the simple or utilitarian argument now you might argue perhaps that everything else will flow from that so there are very very predictable interactions between the types of places in which we spend our days and and nights and how we

Interact as humans and how happy we feel I could go on for this for hours and I have it Adam’s present I won’t do that now I promise but I I’ll just pick out a few um front Gardens um there’s a range of studies uh in Denmark in Holland in

Australia that finds that if you live on streets modest front Gardens about the distance between us us here but a little bit longer um you actually tend to talk to your neighbors more if it’s a too big a front garden you’re hidden behind the bushes or behind the park car if there’s

No front garden at all there’s no reason to be there but a modest front garden in which you might be picking the Roses or bu the lawn whatever you’re doing actually it’s a good way to speak to your neighbors as they go past you um with without them being on your space on

Your or you upon theirs so there’s one example second example um dark bushes in very large spaces and the very good at creating large spaces uh most people are nervous if that’s the rout to our front door and it’s not a well trodden path that someone might jump out of us at

Even fact there’s not even if there’s not a huge risk of that um thirdly traffic uh there’s a series of studies one of the most recent one is in Bristol similar streets with different levels of traffic from very low to very high the very high level traffic if I had a chart

I could show you the map if when you map the Friendship patterns on that street and knowing your neighbors is a good thing I think we’re s of taking as PS as red as long as you don’t have to talk to them when you don’t want to um the the

Streets that’s an important thing that’s why corridors don’t work you’re forced to talk to Neighbors when you don’t want to um seriously um uh really they’re all laughing I’m being serious but um streets with very hair traffic it’s not just that you know few of your neighbors

On your side of the street you know almost no one on the other opposite side of the street so there are relationships here which are relatively predictable at an individual level I’m not going to predict how you’re going to respond but give me 100 people and and the data

Allows you to to predict um final one beautiful streets with a human rhythm of scale and sense of place people tend to walk more slowly down them and to speak to people more as they do so we can we can pull out these types of themes so there’s a utilitarian argument that

Place matters uh in the little platoon I think from that flows places metaphor um we care about places it’s a symbol it’s a metaphor for our communities and our families you you can see this in the polling indeed public first and others have done polling on this let me give

You an example we recently did a little report really very little report on what I called Street scars you’ve all seen them it’s when you’ve got you know cobbles or sets or or yorkston probably in the street out here and some expletive deleted utility firm has come

Along ripped them up to put something in and just put a scar of Tom out there which then sits there unloved and untended for the next nine months um I won’t I won’t go into the to the legalities of that now but when we started putting out on social media a

Few months ago requests for examples then did our little report on it we were deluged so many people God this really annoys me I really care about this and yet was something we a little bit nervous about it felt a little bit modest a little bit my God it was like

We pulled out a plug so i’ I’d argue that place acts as a metaphor if it’s not cared for then we don’t feel valued for care and that’s particularly the TR as as Adam can talk about uh probably better than me when you then go outside the the metropolis and and then it

Becomes a metaphor that is true in every sense of the word I promise I won’t go for too much longer thirdly places as theaters for not just for our public lives but also for the interaction between our public life and our private lives um unless we’re sociopaths or

Misanthropes we all need to commune with you know with with neighborhoods and with communities but also need our homes we need our spaces and good places allow to move relatively seamlessly between the private and the public the best streets I’d argue I’d argue you can see

This in the pricing data are ones where you got Terrace streets modest Gardens you can probably go up some steps before you go into your home so you can easily get into your private space and the little Back Garden behind then also come into the public space into the streets

Perap just around the corner and down the road to the church the CH the pub uh the the neighborhood shop whatever it might be so places and this is a very conservative point I think because you know conservatives I think argue that we know we live our lives in in real places

Not in sort of abstract Concepts and I think you know the street and the well-designed uh Village or town speaks to that and and finally perhaps I don’t think um places as sacred as the communion with the past and and and the future you know places clearly have

Symbolic meaning to us obviously the senator but also the neighborhood Pub your grandparents home um uh when the the Crooked house pob was knocked down a few weeks ago my golly look at what that meant it obviously meant something to people it wasn’t just a pure I mean the

Pure utilitarian benite response would be said this is ridiculous and yet cly wasn’t ridiculous it was clearly meaningful to people um in 431 BC I know you all know this but let me just remind you in case it’s temporally slipped your mind in in 431 BC the Athenian Statesman

Pericles beseeched his fellow citizens to love their city in his famous funeral oration I would have your day by I would have you Day by Day Fix Your Eyes Upon the greatness of Athens until you become filled with the love of her and for those of you who know your Greek which

Doesn’t really include me uh the word he used for love was the was actually the uh the uh the more the less metaphorical and and the more physical word for for love um so Place matters to us and I’d argue and I won’t get to De time on this

Time permites for three reasons and again you can see this in the pricing places have actually got worse over the last 50 or 60 or 70 years three reasons for that I would say one is modernism uh we actually literally took away the sense of enclosure as something that

Matters and that and places need to look nice second and this may be controversial I don’t know is the motorc car Motorcars are great for getting us around suburbs and the Countryside they actually create more externalities negative externalities in towns or in tighter places and they do positives the

Freedom of children to move around Villages towns and cities has provably and showa collapsed over the last 70 or 80 years your grandparents had more Liberty when they were 14 than you did and you probably had more Liberty when you were 14 than your children do if

They’re 14 M are 15 and 13 so I I straddle that age um and the third perhaps this is the least offensive the three is is is uh the third reason why we make L good places is is material so we can now just put up really really big faceless buildings incredibly cheaply

And easily if you look at the first Iron framed building in the UK uh which is a a flax molting in shopshire it’s actually rather lovely because it’s all done with local bricks because it sort of had to be there was nothing else to do it with so we can now make faceless

Buildings without coherent complexity that we again we know s I’m I going on too long I can see you looking um so so those those are those are my uh my keyword my first of my two paradoxes uh my three problems and and four reasons now let me quickly go through what I

Suggest we do about about it um the first is we need to re-empower I mean if the example of Street scar shows that um we need to give people agency again of what happens to their places now I think we’re moving in the right direction on that neighborhood planning was created a

Decade ago it’s sort of half right it’s done good things but it’s basically being captured by an overly complex very difficult process is there only half work but it’s helpful I think ultimately this will lead to my second point we need to re-empower people to improve their places by right um we’ve been

We’ve looked in detail that create streets for example legislation regulation about planting Street trees most people want Street trees let’s we can we could change the way the rules and the wiring Works to make that easier there are proposals on Street votes there proposals which I and others have

Pushed for popular design via patent books and design codes versus planning and that’s my second theme which is moving away from planning and towards predictable patterns that people can influence locally about how you need to change places around here so get places that are easy to walk in more beautiful

More likable um and then third I think is is almost more verbal more conceptual is we actually need to red discover as a community and as a sort of political society that the the language about sacred and beautiful places and to re uh to revalue that and it’s very telling

That one of the most successful bits of social housing in the world um fugar social housing in alburg is 500 years old it funds Itself by tourists coming to visit it to look at how marvelous it is so that all the people who live in there at social housing can afford can

Live there very freely now maybe that’s putting our Point too far but I don’t see why we there’s no reason why we can’t we’re much richer than we were in Germany 500 years ago we can create social housing that is so beautiful it is worth paying to visit and until we

See that as something that we seek to do I guarantee we will CL create worthless places that we be thrown away once they once they pass their first transitory use um my final two reasons which things we need to do which link together and again maybe be controversial I don’t

Know we need to relearn both to create and to Steward existing places to be what I call centrifugal uh rather sorry um copal ra it’s so easy to get that the wrong way around copal rather than centrifugal I they come together they have middles we’re pulled together

Rather than being spun out onto the Ring Road and I’m afraid still despite some good policy at a high level what we’re doing in reality continues to pull us apart as neighborhoods so you know Cambridge County Hall taken from A Fine 1920s or 30s near Georgian building near

The middle and put into an ugly box on the Ring Road uh and we see that just time after time we’re being pulled apart into living just as the modernist predicted in sort of zoned areas for housing over there and drive to boxland for shopping over there that takes away

That serendipitous ability to bump into your neighbor or your friend or your colleague as you’re going to the pub or the shops or dropping people off at school um and and then ultimately we yes we need to relearn how to move free and to put the car is one of the ways we

Move around but not the only way we look to move around in towns and cities so I think those are things I’d set out and if I may I’ve got another minute or so or 30 seconds I’ll just finish with a quote from a Tor and Gavin didn’t he was

About to say no but I didn’t let him give him the chance 30 seconds 30 seconds um he describes the he was Roger scrutin describes the street he was living in in the 1980s for the marriage of uh of then Prince Charles the English are not given to sitting on doorsteps or

Standing about nevertheless their movements in the street have a markedly leisurely quality and when on the occasion of Prince Charles’s marriage we gathered together for our party the orderly windows and the porticos seem to provide protection and endowed our comings and going with a naturalness that they could hardly have acquired in

A park or in any other place that was not so agreeably overlooked by accessible entrances the classical wall it’s nearly finished which is H humanly proportioned safe garious and quietly Vigilant constantly reminds The Pedestrian that he is not alone and that he’s in a world of human encounter and

He must match the good manners of the wall which guides him thank you very much thank you nich word Round of Applause um just before I move on to Katie I must satisfy my curiosity uh on the Greek um I have no idea was it yes I

Think so my my Greek is very very bad but interesting if so because that implies being in love with right almost like the relationship you’d have with a person dra exactly that is the distinction I’m happy to be corrected on an I’m not trying to show off what you did you did humble

Brag no thank you um thank you so much for those insights Nicholas and Katie I’m I’m going to um come to you next through the segue of uh the the great um Roger scrutin who um um many years ago uh when he was still with us did a um a

Documentary which I think was called why Beauty masses um and he went to um a very dilapidated high-rise um housing estate in I think it was reading which had been very badly um vandalized and I suppose he was exploring the relationship between the decline of place with CRI criminality antisocial

Behavior Etc and he said you know this building has been badly vandalized um but it was it was kind of a horrible brutalist building not very Humane to live in and he said but you shouldn’t blame the vandals this place was built by vandals which I think was a rather

Nice of twist on it um but clearly um this relationship is very important and a lot of the work that om has done on leveling up has actually centered around this question of um Law and Order crime antisocial behavior and how that can impede the flourishing of communities

And it’s something that’s very important to voters as well in their sense of having a place that they’re proud to call home um could you tell us about um your experience of um of of of dealing with and tackling crime and Law and Order and how that’s interacted with the

Communities that you represent sure um thank you so uh great to be here first time and what a lovely space to be talking in when we’re talking about nice spaces very inviting um and I’m not going to try and quote and and do the Greek or the Romans or whatever so

You’re you’re safe here I’m only a simple girl from Sussex what can I say um but it was really interesting I was thinking about this um when I was invited to to uh speak and uh and pride in place and leveling up and for me I

Those that the three things I think of and when I speak to the public they they talk about aspiration they talk about equality they talk about opportunity but the one clear thing that is the barrier to all of those is crime and criminality um it impacts everybody the impact of

Crime is huge on individuals and on communities and the effects can go on for years and years and years not just momentarily as well um I think when you were referring earlier to the buildings and and obviously the police now work quite hard to try and design out crime

Um so you can if you are putting up a building now contact UM secured by Design which is a company that’s owned by policing and they go out and they will you know um tell you where to put bits and pieces and make sure lights are

Up where they should be and and so on but um the broken windows Theory everybody’s very common very familiar with now if an area is allowed to um be decline then other things start to decline as well it just starts with you know one little um one little window

Being smashed in or a weed growing through uh the Pavements um or or bins being left on the streets and not emptied and so on and over very quickly um over quite a short period of time the whole area will will denigrate and uh and then crime flourishes it’s a bit

Like a petri dish of germs I always find if you’ve got a little opportunity germ there it will grow and grow and grow um and if you look at you know I was just thinking police are probably when you’re talking about the roots police are absolutely integral to society um it’s

What’s really interesting is if you read the media about the police you’d think everybody hates them uh nationally probably they do but locally we all love our local police officer um and when I speak to the public they all they ever want to see is more

Bobbies on the Beats that’s all I ever hear about because they’re like the glue they’re The Roots they’re the bits that hold Society together and Robert Peele said you know the police are the people and the people are the police and without that security amongst all of us

Um it’s very difficult for I think Society to to carry on doing what it wants to do so I mean if you look at um shoplifting for example in the last year and a half uh I’ve been quite uh vocal around we’ve seen unprecedented levels

And why have we seen this rise well it’s a bit like the old broken windows Theory again in in place with shoplifting we’re in those shops day in day out they they are our spaces they are our communal areas where we as Society come together I’ve got old ladies in villages who go

Into their local well I would say the post office although there’s not that many of them around now but they’ll go into the local store or the coffee shop because that is Central to them and if people are going in and and shoplifting and it’s being ignored it gets worse and

Those that are perpetrating the crime get more Brazen and they get more confident and they come back time and time and time again and I think this is a classic example of that broken windows Theory where the police overlooked it for too long uh because it wasn’t

Serious enough or maybe the value of the item being being taken wasn’t enough um and and actually what they failed to really understand was the impact of that crime uh they didn’t join the dots up and they couldn’t see The Wider impact it has until of course it gets to the

Point where it’s got to now um where we’ve got unprecedented levels and I’m sure if I asked anybody if I said now to everybody put your hand up in the room if you’ve been in a store and seen someone shoplift recently I expect quite a few people would actually raise their

Hand um yes so it is um that that for me was quite an interesting point and going back to you know crime and criminality how how it really affects where you live and your house prices when the government said that they were going to put out um uh crimes available

I think it’s on police. you can go on now and you can see how many crimes have happened in your street um we had one particular Street in hayward’s Heath near where I live in Sussex where apparently there were more crimes happening there than anywhere else and the local insurers were looking at

Downgrading the house prices what we found out was it was actually the police station that was there and because of course they record lots of crimes in one area that particular Street had gone through the roof um and just I mean I I I won’t go on for very long just one

More one more thought um we when I talk about joined up policing we also need joined up thinking when it comes to how we put that pride in place back amongst our government departments as well um sometimes that joined up thinking doesn’t happen across government departments I say sometimes very

Politely um quite often it doesn’t happen and if I take as a recent example we had the UK shared Prosperity fund fantastic in Sussex I have 12 district and bur councils all of whom get 1 million each to spend in their area putting back pride of place and and they

Were allowed to spend it on the community on the place on the businesses or on skills and so I put together a business case to say I would like to put uh an officer responsible for pride in place across all our high streets in each of your districts for a very small

Amount of money here’s the business proposal and every single one of those district and bar councils chucked it out and said no because we’d rather spend it on cycle lanes because they’re more important and I do think sometimes we Overlook that that kind of joined up thinking delighted Adam’s here because

He’s kind of responsible for the town boards bit and and there’s a little bit more joined up thinking there because actually I’ve been included in that one so I’m really delighted but I’ll just leave you with those and I’m sure when we do more questions more will come out

Um in time KY thank you very much um Adam uh I’m going to come to you now um because um I’d love to your to pick your brains um particularly on the experience that you’ve had recently visiting various towns um throughout the UK but um Adam I should have also mentioned has

Worked uh with us Mayors before and was also head of policy to Andy Street Mayor of uh the West Midland so you have a lot of experience dealing with the municipal level uh as well as um newer experience um in terms of uh smaller towns um from

Your perspective um what is the key to unlocking potential um in towns um in communi is when in particular the economic direction of travel has been towards ever greater centralization in London and and the southeast and is it possible to reverse a sense of relative decline how is that

Done uh so yes I think it is and I want to I want to talk about um Pride where pride comes from because it’s quite a kind of nebulous term and easy to throw around in politics but quite hard to focus on on quantify why that Pride

Matters and actually why it’s quite hard to advocate for pride is a thing we should focus on particularly in policy terms um and what we should do in order to maintain that Pride so to come to that bit of your question last if you think about what makes you proud of

Where you live kind of conjure that up if someone says why are you proud of either way you live currently or where you grew up just think of what that is I think it’s probably one of four things uh and hold that in your head and

Just check if I’m right and yell at me afterwards if I’m wrong I think it’s either a historic building of some sort that might be a statue in a town square it might be a Heritage asset it might be a piece of industrial Heritage um or it

Is a green space a park a beach a square uh a sports club this might be the wrong crowd for that but it’s often a sports club um or a pub uh let me run through those four things historic building um public first did some fantastic research asking

People what made them proud of their area and historic buildings came above sports clubs local shops local groups and they argue that’s because it makes um identity that might be quite amorphous concrete it allows people to say I’m the sort of person that’s from this place and here’s something which

Visualizes what that identity is often if it’s industrial Heritage it’s a former Mill it’s a town hall that might have been from the kind of Victorian era or previously it points to a point of uh of prosperity that might have existed in that area before I’ve spent a lot of

Time in recent mil towns in the Northwest and you have gorgeous architecture in a lot of these places often rows of shops on the bottom floor that are kind of beckon shops or horrible architecture and then gorgeous buildings just um above and so that Heritage those historic buildings gives

People a sense of of who they are where they’re from and what they’re proud of in South Shields uh someone in a focus group told us that they drive the long way home so they can go past South Shields Town Hall every day and just

Give them a sense of their area and what it’s about historic buildings massively matter secondly on green spaces we did some work in Walo and the arborium there is this gorgeous Green Space right in the middle of the Town whenever we ask people what makes you proud of your

Patch they probably firstly say nothing and make some sort of sarcastic comment about how things were going downhill but if you press them they talk about the park so they like to walk their dog there they like to spend time there um in jro someone described the beachfront

As the main reason that they’ve stuck around in their area and described uh South tside as like the algar with a fleece um which I think they ially should put on all of the posters for that area but if you look Coastal communities massively outperform in

Terms of the level of Pride people have in their place relative to the level of deprivation there right you’d expect a lot of these areas to have some crushing levels of poverty to be places where lots of people are trying to escape but actually lots of people say my part of

The country is is the most beautiful and a lot of that is to do with that water front with that view that goes out front so natural assets green spaces beaches Parks hugely important third thing uh sports clubs if you say to someone how’s your area doing they’ll often again

Pause lar and take a breath and say well let’s talk about how the local football club’s doing you go to oldum they will tell you that the plight of Alm athletic is the plight of that place the fact the foreign owner came in stripped the assets they’ve plummeted down I think

The first the only founding member of the Premier League to have been out outside of the efl they see that as symbolic of what’s happened in their area and what’s happened to their place in other areas I mean reom is the most classic example recently where there’s been real investment in that football

Club but also football clubs and sports clubs and rugby league clubs actually particularly in lots of parts of the Midlands uh and the north that have seen their role in building a sense of pride in Arrington where I was recently every eight-year-old is given an Arrington Stanley football shirt by the club and

That’s partly because the owner Andy Holt was just outraged at loads of people wearing Blackburn shirts or Worse Liverpool shirts in his part of the world but every eight-year-old once a year gets in a coach goes to aington Stanley’s football club and the first team hand them an aington Stanley shirt

And they wear that then around their area and that gives them a sense of Pride and of belonging so sports clubs enormously important Burnley there’s been some phenomenal work to link Burnley football club in fact physically they’re now doing a lot of regeneration work between turf Moore and the Town

Center the kind of turf to toown walk to make really clear that that kind of aspirational Premier League venue I say aspirational looking very well at the moment but usually that aspirational venue is something that everyone should feel a sense of belonging uh to a sense of

Association with uh the fourth one is pubs so my favorite books is um I haven’t got a quote in front of me if I known I was speaking I would have brought one but Ray oldenberg wrote this gorgeous book called The Great good place which looked at third spaces

Written in the kind of 50s or 60s but talked about the kind of pubs of Britain the beer Halls of Germany the cafes of Paris and examined the role that those third spaces uh performed the places that were not home or were not not uh an office and it’s those pubs those cafes

That can be everything in helping someone uh want to live in an area want to spend time they drive footfall and all those sorts of good things but they can also be a place of kind of communion and Collective Gathering uh where a lot of those sorts of formal institutions

Have slipped away so those four things I think are some of the places that pride comes from makes the sort of slightly amorphous concept concrete why do they matter so I was in Nelson recently uh in Pendle um a town named after after a pub weirdly the N Nelson in town was

Previously two Villages they needed to rename it and so they just called it Nelson because that was one of the things that was there maybe not a great start for um long-term civic pride and usually when I’m doing visits as part of my job advising the government on towns

We meet with the council counselors Community groups whatever else here uh we got to meet with 15 teenagers um who are at a youth club and uh I sort of had to strip all the policy wonk language out of my opening pitch about what the government’s long-term plan for towns

Was Bloody hard to do um and just ask them what they wanted for their area um so a couple of things that are really interesting one Safety and Security number one right so you expect sometimes an idea that well of course there are kind of curtain twitchers and old ladies

That are worried about spending time in the town center but really they’re overreacting the number one group that are worried about levels of antisocial behavior and low level crime are the primary victims of that who are often young people themselves right and the solution that they’re after was of

Course they would like we need more things to do by the way they want a Primark they want a JD if anyone’s writing this down Primark JD they want a place to buy K-pop CDs I didn’t know anyone bought CDs anymore but apparently the majority of CDs sold now K-pop or

Taylor Swift they want places to do those things but they want visible policing right so they’re actually and that might be pcsos that might be specials that might be wardens but they want uh an adult Authority in the spaces they’re in to make sure that they are safe because they’re the primary victims

But I mention these young people because um I asked them how many of you want to stay in Nelson want to live in Nelson when you’re older and they all laughed at me firstly rockus laughed at me uh and then said obviously not no when I asked them where they’d move oddly they

All said Burnley which is just down the road another one of our long-term plan for towns areas all of whom either want to move to Manchester or Liverpool but regardless they all wanted to move away and I asked them why and they gave lots of answers Safety and Security there’s

Not a JD etc etc and then this one kid who is in the back right of the room wearing this bright red Avengers t-shirt who hadn’t spoken for the rest of the session kind of paused and said it can’t even be bothered to put up Christmas lights said every other town around

There puts up Christmas lights and they can’t ever be bothered around here if they don’t care about that why should I stay and I think the reason I make a case in policy terms for pride in place is because one of the biggest risks to our towns is that people who can leave

Do people with the Talent or the means or the wherewith all to get ahead in life feel like they should use that Talent those means to escape and what that means is not only do you get the kind of technical term of brain drain but you basically mean that those that

Really want to do something with their lives and build their future don’t live in a place you lose that aspiration you lose that sense and so when we heard a council official in a place I won’t name the other day when I said you’ve got to do loads of Engagement with your

Community to develop your plans said the problem with asking the community around here is you’re just going to get bins and benches what do you mean bins and and they said well you know they’re just going to want to get the bins empty more regularly and fix the benches yeah

That’s that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do right and now of course if you’ve got a 20 million Fund in 10 years to do it and you want to spend 20 million on bins and benches will probably be a bit skeptical and I’ll have the treasury a little bit annoyed

At me for how we’ve Ed those funds that is a perfectly reasonable place to start to say the community right let’s get that stuff done let’s make sure you’re not waiting through litter and walking through a door adorned in graffiti in order to do this community meeting

That’s a Fine Place to Start so that’s where pride comes from that’s why it matters what do we do in order to Steward it the the challenge with all of those things I outlined is that they take a really long time to build up you know historic buildings Generations

Green spaces don’t just pop up overnight football clubs again have that sense of being part of a generation of people they really don’t come up overnight people are very rarely proud of a new thing in their area right it might be there’s a wonderful Cafe that’s just

Open but it’s often in a nice part of town on a nice Town Square among some nice public realm it’s very hard to create sources of Pride which means that stewardship in a very kind of small C Scruton and conservative way matters because where those assets are either damaged or become foror and

Forgotten or Worse are lost that has a sometimes irreparable impact on a sense of pride in a place that’s why the graffiti on the senat half or the hanging bar baskets that are dying don’t just matter because they’re an individual bit of the public realm that’s broken but because that was a

Source of Pride and identity for people and they’ve seen it ignored and run Rod over so stewardship really matters and stewardship by the state is often very challenging local government budgets are massively pressed national government are probably quite bad at making uh identifying those things that matter to

Local people when football clubs or you know media assets fall into foreign hands they might not be good stewards so we need to think about what are those things that give Pride to an area ensure that we realize they’re important and then ensure that they have the right

Stewardship that might be by communities themselves it might be by local areas it might sometimes be by councils but the question there should be not who’s going to maximize commercial return from this although Revenue might sometimes be important but who’s going to ensure this continues to be a source of Pride I mean

That people who want to go far can in the vernacular stay local so I’ll leave it there but pride pride is something that is really underappreciated and looked down on particularly in policy circles and actually I think it’s the key to unlocking a lot of the broader Ambitions we have around leveling up

Thank you Adam um fascinating stuff um we are hoping that uh Minister Lee rowy is uh on his way five minutes five minutes subject to proceedings um in the house but whilst we uh uh wait for him uh wait for his arrival um we just do a little bit of discussion Nicholas I’d

Like to come back to you on housing in particular if I may um so one of the themes that um onward has explored a lot and which we are very passionate about in our future of conservatism work is the idea of of home uh and that could be

The idea of Home in terms of uh nationhood and the national Community um home in terms of local communities and places as we’ve been discussing this evening but also quite literally homes uh people people actually having a place to live and more than a place to live

But a place to put down Roots raise a family uh and so on one of the challenges in policym is perhaps um the tension between people’s desire for homes uh in terms of housing shortage and people not being able to to get on the property ladder and other people’s

Sense of home this community is mine I don’t want to see it changed in ways that I don’t recognize with uh you know unpleasant new builds and so on um I know you’ve done fantastic work in this space how do we navigate those competing uh those competing desires for people

For that sense of home uh carefully I think um I I’ll just I’ll say I’ll say two things just just on that word home actually um it’s always it’s always puzzling that the French don’t have a word home that’s another that’s a sideline but um um um

It is really striking uh we have a little swear box for this in C streets actually because in almost every development firm or plan planning practice or that I said architectural firm that we’ve worked with or interacted with with some very honorable exceptions um they don’t use the word

Home home is a bit of low status as a thing to say in a professional Circle certainly developers tend to talk about units or if you’re lucky a dwelling um how many of you aspire to live in a unit I sort of thought you’d might say that

Um so actually sort of and it’s not quite your question but but it s comes back to what I was half saying I think what Adam was saying very eloquently is actually we we we just s we as a profession and as a as a public people setting public policy either nationally

Or locally um that lo as a sort of Civic Society we we actually need to care about home we we need to talk about it and value it so the first part of the answer it of may seem paradoxically simple is well let’s just talk about homes and creating homes and stewarding

Homes and allowing places to be homely again it’s s of word it’s quite easy to look down upon no places that are homely are good it’s where we want to spend time and so that point one point point two would be um and I don’t want to get into technical planning discussion

Because I will lose the small M of public are still listening to me but um um because we make it so hard to create new buildings and homes uh in this country particularly in the Southeast um what the planning system and developers end up doing and you know you can’t

Blame them um is to squeeze as much as they can into a small number of sites where they’re actually able to build something and this is this is particularly true in London but it’s also this is true all across the southeast and also Manchester and a few

Other sort of hot spots is so you’ll get you know Suburbia twostory coming along and then suddenly you’ve got an opportunity area you know some old factory or old sort of processing plant from 1950s or something that got left behind by the victorians and suddenly

You got from two stories to sort 20 or 25 or certainly more than 15 and what you can find in again in the poding is people find that very offensive to their concept of my neighborhood um you can argue that’s rational you can argue it’s irrational but it’s certainly consistent

And and very very predictable what we find in our polling is that once you go above a if you’ve got a well articulated facade uh by that I mean it’s got cerent complexity it it’s got rhythm it’s got Variety in a pattern it’s probably built in the local materials and people are

Very aware of the local materials I’ll come back to that um you can get actually public support up to about six or seven stories you couldn’t do that in the middle of the village but you can get actually I wouldn’t say easily but you can get that but once you go beyond

That the public sport just completely collapses I mean you know down to five or six% even so lots of people accept in principle correctly the need for new housing my God we do need new housing but it’s it’s a platonic design desire for new housing it’s not actually sort

Of real around here when you when you propose that so to answer your question we’ve got to make it easier in ways that local public will support for places to densify and perhaps better word intensify organically spontaneously within a rules based system and I said we need to move from planning to patent

Books that are acceptable so what are the ways in which you know a street of twostory uh 1930s or 1960s houses can with local consent become four-story terrorist houses can add a shop there or a pub there that’s that’s how our Town’s historically developed you know around

Here we’re close to westmin Abby and the old Westminster palace um this was two story Huts in the 12th century and it’s just grown the street pattern here will be very very ancient but they’ve just grown organically over time and now they’re sort of stuck in Amber so I

Think that’s ultimately the answer is go move from planning to something that with local consent allows buildings to evolve in ways that respect the natural vernacular what we found I’ll finished on this and it’s particularly true in the countryside and in smaller towns people are staggeringly aware of their

Local build material um and we do this if you go and ask people in bits of Yorkshire how should you know what should new buildings around here look like what they should be built out of even people who couldn’t tell you the name of the local Building Material

Unning identifies as yorkstone as the thing they want it built up on go to Sussex or Sur and you’ll tend to get red bicks or hung tiles or flid or but people are incredibly responsible they probably if you ask people you know what’s the local Stone around here they probably can’t tell

But they can recognize it and on the whole you know between 60 and 80% of them will go for that as a thing so I think and again you quite often find when you talk to when I talk to developers or planners they’re quite um scathing about that as a sort of you

Know conservatism and and and and lism well no and the love thing about Stone particular little brick is that stone is incredibly sustainable material particularly when it’s quarried locally so it ticks modern boxes as well as old boxes is that a vague is that a vague

Answer that that’s not at all vague if specific comprehensive in Brackets too specific can I just make one comment what really struck me what you said about unit or dwelling I was sitting there thinking oh my goodness when the police record burglary they record burglary dwelling or burglary n dwelling they

Don’t say burglary home and it’s and it’s the it’s the and it’s theage exactly and it’s the home the home should be sacras sang and it’s the in I remember when my house was the house I grew up in was burgled and my mother quite reasonably was very upset about it

It was an invasion of our privacy of her pracy of our home it was that more than the actual value of what was stolen that was so upsetting to my parents and above my mother really interesting Katie on this um subject of uh the link between policing and a sense of local identity

Confidence in Law and Order pride and and so on I was struck by the comment that you made um about um how prevalent the view is um that people in communities just want to see more Bobbies on the beat and that there’s higher trust when there is someone that

They know and that they recognize yeah um joh Yates who’s not with us this evening unfortunately but I know he’s written in theast with has um has has written in the past about um about this Fue the other way around as well which is it actually helps the police when they’ve got um

Good intimate knowledge of the local area and you know uh the the the individuals and characters and places where there where there’s trouble and where there’s not and families and so on um what are the impediments to having a genuinely relational localized um kind of approach towards policing um if it’s

Something that voters want how can we move towards that I think you well I mean it’s it’s something that a lot of police forces are moving towards more and so what I’m seeing is now a lot of my colleagues and their Chief consales are saying we need Town officer um

Police officers who are just dedicated for the town space or you’re seeing for example we set up a rural crime team I had a previous Chief consal who used to say to me oh no crime Katie is just crime it either happens in the town or

It happens in the rural area and I thought not sure I agree with that but I could didn’t do anything about it because they have operational um control and they make those decisions but of course um uh when my new Chief Cal came along um she and I had a much more

Aligned way of thinking um and so we set up a dedicated rural crime team um and and that we now have 22 officers in that and they cover all sorts of you know the Heritage crime crime uh where you see a lot of stealing from the churches um as

Well as the the farming and and so on types of crime but it’s um it’s a really interesting move back I think in the last certainly when I came into policing in 2012 there was a big move ah there was a big move to um uh more of the sort

Of complex crimes your your rapes your serious sexual offenses and so on and a move away from the crimes that mattered to us hello CU cuz they weren’t see is that important um and they weren’t as complex and and I think we lost that and now we’re starting to see it moving back

That way and and and great because that gives people confidence we feel much happier when we see a police officer in our community and we’re more likely then to pick the phone up to the police and give them that vital bit of intelligence that they need to solve the crime that

They’ve been looking for so can can I just jump in on that gin so this point about kind of crime and then a feeling of Safety and Security is really important and in some ways it’s linked to this conversation about kind of Pride as something that’s

A bit more amorphous and is felt versus an economic indicator you might ose to assess an area right so crime has fallen by about 75% in the last 30 years if you ex exclude a fraud and computer misuse not because it’s unimportant but because it plays havoc with the numbers crime is

Down it’s just factually correct particularly the most violent forms of crime but people don’t feel much safer or more secure anyway you look it right so you can look at whether people approve of the police whether people think the government are doing a good job in managing crime whether people

Feel that crime rates in their area have increased or say the same people don’t feel safer and we did a report on this recently and if you dig into that that is because if you ask people what types of crimes matter in your area and load

We’ve seen loads of polls on this three things always come out on top uh antisocial Behavior theft and burglary and Drug offenses and if you look at the trends for those three crimes they are not universally down so antisocial Behavior interestingly recorded instances have dropped massively over

The past 10 years um but survey data of people saying they’ve experienced ASB has gone up right so people aren’t bothering to report it because I don’t think anything will be done drug offenses have remained constant about a quarter of people say they’ve seen kind of drug use or drug dealing in their

Area and theft particular the most visible forms of theft like shoplifting that ktie described are on the up so you’ve got this Gap then between people saying they feel safe and secure in the amount of crime that is going on now a lot of people I’ve chatted to either you

Know officials or policy folk have said well people are just wrong they they just they’re just incorrect right and so why should we put more resources into this thing because they are wrong crime is down and so we should put on other things that matter now there is a sort of policy wonkish

Answer which is well the felt might become the data because people stop reporting and and and but I really think there is something this is where kind of the political matters in policy terms because if you do just leave it to kind of um uh officials are non-political

Folk they will be led by that sort of reasoning but any MP or police and crime commissioner knows that that lived experience matters if you feel unsafe or insecure if you feel you don’t have a lack of Pride even if it’s difficult to capture that sometimes in the broader

Data but economic Prosperity or anything else that matters and it deserves a priority in how we think about what we do and I’m glad that people like ktie are therefore emphasizing neighborhood and local policing so even as crime rates are going down people also feel a

Sense of Safety and Security if I made it for 10 seconds I know you want to get to the minister 10 seconds it’s also something it’s really striking when we do community engagement in master planning and design in prosperous and less prosperous parts of the country it’s it’s a binary difference so it’s

Nearly always the first and the prominent thing that comes up in community discussions in sundland or in Grimsby I would say it doesn’t matter in Sussex so sorry but it comes up much less it’s a really quite a binary distinction we see right yes um we’ve

Got 20 minutes left and then we have a hard stop at um quarter two and I’m very keen to bring in Minister Lee Ry who’s just joined us thank you for being here this evening with us hope every was well um uh in the house um just by way of

Brief introduction uh lee rowy was uh appointed Minister for housing in the department for leveling up um on the in December 2023 has previously served as parliamentary under Secretary of State um uh in the same Department uh and in the department for business energy and Industrial strategy as was uh is a

Former government Whip and is the MP for Northeast darash uh lee thank you for being here um our discussion this evening has focused on the theme of um pride in place um obviously this is a very important subject for um the department in which you’re uh a minister

And how we can restore uh a sense of civic pride a sense of um Civic flourishing both on kind of the the social side of things um Community Connection uh and you know Adam spoke very eloquently about people’s feeling of Pride but also the economic side

Around uh around access to uh to housing the built environment uh and so on um just for five minutes or so could you talk to us it’s really kind of a blank check um how do you feel that very often a blank check because we just Keen to

Keen to get your thoughts um how can we um how can we best um deliver a sense of local leveling up uh in some of our communities that feel left behind um in particular given your brief through the built environment and through um housing reform thank you thank you very much

Firstly I’m so sorry for for being late and I really apologize I used to hate it when MPS swand in halfway through a thing decided that they knew everything and just sort of started talking to people so I’m about to do it and I’m really really really really sorry I

Obviously don’t have the context so this may be well off beam but um speaking on personal level as a uh red W MP as they talk about as aosst to minister and come to the portfolio later um uh and without getting too existential if you if the

Question is uh how do we Foster a sense of pride in place we’ve got to recognize there’s a group of people within Society who isn’t who aren’t that interested in place any longer um now that’s partly growth in social media that’s part that people can live in

Their own bubbles it’s partly that they don’t have to have a huge amount of interaction on a day-to-day level with their their physical geography and then we have a whole heap of national and supernational Trends around uh you know internationalism removing the concept of nation state all of those things which I

Don’t know whether is the purpose of what we’re supposed to be talking about today but there is just a cohort of people who are not that interested in geographical place any longer either by uh Choice uh that they don’t need to because they’d rather spend their time

In in circles which aren’t related to geography or ideology because they have decided they want to dismantle uh geography they want decideed they want to dismantle the concept of nation state or the concept of community um but putting that aside so we I don’t go too

Far into that that rabbit hole for the vast majority of people they do care about geography and they do care about place my my seat is um a seat which the conservative party has never won I know this isn’t a conservative discussion but conservative party has never won other

Than in 2017 and 80 years and the reason they flipped I think and it’s my hometown it’s my where I grew up and so I saw it over 35 years before I got elected and 40 40 OD now been elected is I just think they got really jacked off

With being ignored for so long and that represented itself on the brexit vote 63% leave represented itself in electing somebody who uh back when he was a kid at school never thought that the 18,000 majority that his seat had towards labor would ever go anywhere near the

Conservatives and it is because there is a general feeling that nobody is listening so if you want to start bringing people strengthening the social fabric which is very very rich underneath I should say you know the and uh when I go into my commun ient 40 or

So different parts of of of North arire there is a huge amount of close uh some of the uh the the communal uh groups organizations activities that you if you scratch underneath below the surface you can you can find them sometimes they’re hard to find they were

Harder to find in my more working class areas than they are in my more middle class areas but it is absolutely there so you know the social fabric is there it’s just hidden in many instances but as a sort of from a from a sort of conceptual basis they’ve got to feel

Like they want that they’re being heard if you want people to have pride in the in their place if you want people to um believe that their place matters they’ve got a feel that they’re being listened to from a geographical perspective from an individual perspective and that is a

Question that all of us as politicians all of as those involved in the political process need to reflect on there are definitely a group of of parts of the country leveling up as the closest proximity but it’s not perfect who just don’t feel that they have been

Listened to doesn’t mean they should be you know we should Pat them on the head all the time it doesn’t mean that we should in substantively just say yes yes yes and whatever means that we actually have to engage with them properly including when they do not support the

Consistent views of the guys over there or the broader Ecco system around them you know they have just as much right to be heard um the second thing is I think there’s got to be a down payment and investment in physical geography um in my part of the world we didn’t get that

For many years we haven’t had much spending I’m a small state conservative but I I recognize that there are times when government does have a responsibility and I can see in my geography that there was a need to there was need both to pump Prime and there

Was a need to give a clear sense from central government that they were listing and the clearest way you can do that is by changing things on the ground that make a difference and so things that we’ve done like the towns fund had been super helpful for me I got two

Towns funds long before I became a minister so wasn’t because of that and you can physically see that people are genuinely interested in how their physical geography has changing and then the thing from a ministerial perspective and there’s many things I could talk from a ministerial perspective but I’m

Sure Nicholas hasal talks about a number of them um is Place matters Beauty matters aesthetic matters and and that is something which I think is is really missed in the sort of mstom of the last 30 or 40 years over that place that I’ve just come from um I’ll give you one last

Exle and I’ll be quiet um my second biggest town is a town called Clay Cross it is a town that sprung up literally out of nowhere in the 1850s when George Stevenson Robert Stevenson was was um shoving a train tunnel through a hill and he found a load of coal and it

Turned from the tiniest Hamlet into a town of 10,000 based on based on uh coal and Mining over a 100 years and then it lost its purpose in the in the N well it lost it in the of 1970s when the last coal mines closed 1980s and it’s

Regained it but it was really unsure of itself until a few until until a few years ago and the fact that we’ve been able to make sure the bus services still work the fact that we’ve been able to do some upgrades to uh their Town Center

The fact that we’ve been able to totally redo their Leisure Center the fact we’ brought banking back to their High Street through a banking Hub it is all those kind of small scale interventions where people actually eventually do say on mass actually do you know what something is changing people are

Listening for the first time in 5050 years and this is making a difference so I don’t have the I don’t have the full answer about about how you bring back pride in place but I can sort of see from my personal experience how you move communities who are quite jaded about

Things along a Continuum which makes them happier than they were a few decades ago I think one of the things that’s really coming out this evening is the sense that this is a jigsaw uh and restoring something like pride in place and the resilience of communities something that has to be approached from

Lots of different angles it’s the law and order an social behavior it’s the built environment it’s the economy um it’s it’s high streets um uh I’m conscious of time so I think I’ll move to some audience questions now um if you could please keep your question short uh

I will cut you off if you go on too long and please can it be a question um do we have microphones roaming around or are people just shouting here we are we have microphone over there please do wait till you get the microphone uh and then

Um say ett strict with the audience wow it’s too scared to do anything see I’m used to conservative party conferen where you got all sorts of crazy people coming out people like uh so yeah please speak microphone uh say your nman organization if you have

One uh and I’ll take two at a time so I’ll start with the gentleman back there you were up for your first bra Lords and eastor uh yay saus you you can you cannot get permission from the council to do anything I can’t we can’t even mow The Verge outside the

House does the they find that the cost of giving permission is so huge the boops they have to jump through uh the difficulty of managing it afterwards what can we do to make it simple to give people agency over their immediate environment okay so a question around uh

Around planning regulation that sort of thing um and here good evening U Mike Salem from the consumer Choice Center uh thank you very much for a very interesting talk uh there are so many questions I’d like to ask but i f is particularly on the future High Street fund how do you think

Uh that turned out to be is it successful do we just throw money at problems or is there more to it than that okay um I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to take the High Street question uh and I’m going to G to give

That to you Adam do you have do you have a view on that I do um so the program I chare the long-term plan for towns tries to learn from some of the challenges of previous funds so the future High Street funds was the right idea a lot of our

High streets are going to need capital investment in order to make them viable in the long term and they’ll need some support from Roga people like Mark Robinson who chaired the high streets task force to help them think about what that’s going to look like almost certainly going to be about less retail

Because there’s going to be less demand for that more residential in town Cent is more of an experience that means that people go to those High streets and you have footfall right all of the right stuff to do the problem with the future High streets fund which I think I can

Say I’m sort of half of employee of Le um is that if it’s he’s shaking his head not anymore I’m glad now if it’s only Capital then you can have some very shiny buildings on a High Street but you don’t have the revenue support which is for the groups individuals events

Whatever else that might sustain that place now of course what you can’t do is forever subsidize a High Street eventually it needs to stand on its own two feet commercially but what you might do is have some of those areas that are on social rent so you might have I don’t

Know a bit of the public sector that pops up on that High Street you might have a charity or Community Hub operating out of it you might have subsidized rent for a period of time uh for some of the properties that sit on top of some of these often gorgeous

Heritage High streets in areas you might want to bid into things like the national three Heritage fund to regenerate some uh parts so the problem with the future High Street funds it was Capital only and what you didn’t do is build the sort of Civic stewardship that

I described that you really need to make those High streets work the best example of that stewardship is usually business Improvement districts I think they are basically wonderful wherever they exist um they are really a little platoon right they might have a very wonky sounding name but they are groups of

Business owners coming together putting their hands in their pockets and taking responsibility for the patch where their business is the problem is in lots of really impoverished areas the business owners don’t have the money in their pocket to put towards that sort of collective good so part of the program I

Run the long-term plan for towns will involve uh some areas seeking to subsidize in the initial instance they’ll have to stand two feet eventually creation of those bids so uh right scheme of the right idea I think that the program I run learns from its flaws and is obviously completely

Fantastic and a well design program who designed it I don’t know some Think Tank I think Lee what do you think um I’m going to give the first question if I may to minister Ry so this was a question on giving local people um agency of their local place uh planning

Regulation how do you give them more agency over what gets done and what gets built in their communities um well we’re we’re struggling to manage risk right and that’s a fundamental problem across lots of democracies we strugg we struggle to manage risk centrally and then we struggle to manage risk locally

In individual areas and that is a manifestation of a culture which doesn’t quite know when to let go and so we have this sort of Halfway House of people being involved enough so that they can control when they want to but not enough so that the risk can be distributed in

Case anything goes wrong and that is just a facet now in lots of Western democracies again without getting too exential and we’re going to have to reverse it it’s no political Pary fault it’s no individual’s fault it’s no prime minister’s fault it’s been growing for 30 years and we’re going to have to

Reverse it over a period of time and it’s going to have to start with some clear views about what the individual can do what agency they have the fact that the state can’t do everything whether in its local or its National form we need a better conversation about

Tradeoffs about what the state is able to do about how it has limited capacity about if it does lots of things badly it doesn’t help whatsoever so it might as well should do some things well and that’s going to be a 105 20 year uh conversation which needs to happen in

Terms of you know in immediate things what we’re trying to do I can’t really comment much on the licensing side because I haven’t looked at that extensively yet but on the planning side we are trying slowly to both lift up parts of the planning system into National policies so that there is less

Discretion locally which you know is a is an attempt to try and create more standardization you know have people have views on that but then also to try and devolve greater power locally so that uh better decisions can be made in in one location But ultimately you know

None of us I can’t none of my colleagues can that place over there can’t control a system with 200 odd different actors in in terms of local government before you get to parishes and things like that so they’re going to have to realize that with the limited resources they’ve got

And they spend a lot of time telling us they’ve got limited resources that need to focus their attention in a way which works for the good of the community as opposed to getting involved in everything a little bit we’ve got a hard stop at quarter two so I’m just going to

Try and squeeze in a couple more uh Alex and then the gentleman here uh Hello Alex Mort for the CPS um Nicholas this is one as you oh I was trying to get out a question uh so design and soone has been uh being talked about you said oh in the last few

Years place and so on but actually it’s been going for a long time since at least the Rogers review which was God about was 25 years ago now why haven’t things improved which I think is a broad uh area and what would you do change it because I think what you’re saying is

Quite compelling but let’s be honest depressingly this conversation has been going for 25 years I don’t think there has been much an improvement in the quality of places that we are creating I’ve just come back from the American exurbs they are better than what we build in lots of this country they have

Ex herbs in America now actually have centers because they’ve worked out that people like them so they are car-based but they actually have high streets in the weird middle of this sort of car-based sprawl uh and yet we haven’t gone anywhere in 25 years really why should

Should we do the answer now since that was directly to you and then we’ll go to second I thought it was to leave um uh so I very happy to take it so so actually wi I was I was looking again at at the Lord Rogers report from you I think 28

Years ago or 25 um so I I think it missed actually half of what needed to be talked about so I don’t think he did talk about design it was too I mean it had lots of good stuff in it it was essentially the case for dense cities

There’s a great case to be made for dense cities it isn’t the case to be made oh isn’t the same case some overlaps with uh beautiful walkable loved ex mining towns in darbishire it it totally lost that it didn’t talk about towns it didn’t talk about neighborhoods or it did only implicitly

So so I actually think it’s only in the last decade that we’ve started to have that wider conversation so I’d slightly if you’ll forgive me uh reject the premise of the question I’d secondly say why why aren’t we why haven’t we made as much progress as as we should I agree

That we haven’t um I think the minister rightly started talking about this is you we still have a very old planning system I think it’s getting better I think it’s getting less old and you just touched on that but we still essentially are running a controlled experiment uh having a

Uniquely discretionary system with uniquely unpredictable quality ask um we’re unpicking that but it’s it’s difficult you know it’s hard to totally change the way whole sector of the economy gets regulated so I think we’re making progress but are not there yet I I wish we’d gone faster um finally this

More controversial um and this is something a challenge great streets is finding so we struggle to recruit people we struggle to recruit Architects or Urban designers who are happy and unashamed to start the entire design process by asking what to people local locally love and find beautiful and how

Not to slightly misquote not to misquote but to uh to quot a official I heard talking a few weeks ago how do we not worry about quote adjusting for the prejudices of the public for end quote um so I mean we we we we need the cre streets are moving into education

There’s only one uh architectural fir so architectural University in the west by which I include North America as well as Europe that unashamedly treat teaches vernacular and classical design so I think until we actually start having planners and Architects coming through who would find what I’ve just said not

Offensive or certainly right not challenging then I think it’s actually very hard because you can say what you’re like in the regulatory policy but if you cannot find architects who can do it well you’re sort of stuffed and the question um very quickly uh gentleman here good evening um I’m P bran I’m

Conservative G cand for Northeast London my day job I work with clients in the environment sector on programs of Engagement consultation and communication um I think one of the biggest issues at the moment in this country is obviously house building and that generational contract social has been destroyed between home ownership um

Through the day job uh and also through my campaigning it’s obvious that main opposition people have to development is that they find out about it way too late they find out when that notice goes up on the lamp post or the leaf that goes through the door to invite them to a

Consultation event I think if people better involved at the allocation stage at the outset of the local plan process that’s where we can get people involved invested in seeing these communties come forward and actually have that uh investment in place happen as well so and and your question is my suggestion

Is do you have a question yeah my my question is do you think we should be encouraging local authorities to involve communities in the allocation process of local plans instead of just having design panels um I’ll give the minister opportunity to comment on that is

Anything you want to say on that as all uh yeah is the short answer the uh the reality is that planning is very frustrating to lots of people as you indicate because they get involved in quote unquote the wrong bit and if lots of decisions are taken up front it is

Even more frustrating when you get told you you’re being asked some questions which you think are genuine and actually half the point has been seeded you know X number of x amount of months before so yes that is absolutely the case what we need to do but the other half which we

Don’t have time to go into um housing is not the problem in my View housing is absolutely not the problem housing there is a process problem in terms of what you’re describing and housing is a manifestation of a set of other policy choices that have either been made

Deliberately or by default which is where people get to housing is a function of population population is a function of a number things and until we link those things closely together we’re never going to get totally the frustration of why people uh are not as happy with housing as we would like them

To be if I made it for five seconds we have quite an odd debate where we have the debates on a Case by case basis when development comes forward in America or much of Europe more of the politics I say move the Democracy forward more of

It happens in the setting of what we call the local plan the French called the local Americans called the zoning or whatever it is and you you have your fights then and you should have a fight about it it should be politicized but you have it strategically rather than

Tactically Time After Time After Time I’m afraid we are out of time I’d love to take more questions but we um we are are under orders from the uh venue uh we do need to be moved on I’m afraid but thank you very much for your questions and your participation and thank you

Thank you very much to all of our speakers this evening who I think have been excellent in their presentations and in their answers to questions so can you join me in give a round of applause to them um a brief plug please do join us for our next future of conservatism uh

Events which will be uh in March that will be available uh uh to look up on the onward website there will be an email uh that comes around about that please subscribe to our mailing list you see details of that our next event this has been focused very much on domestic

Britain Place Community the next event will be about Britain’s um role in the world its trading relationships its economic role um economic security supply chains and our relationship with China in particular it’ll be fascinating uh great lineup of speakers we’re going to have a minister there so look out for

That um also do look out for an upcoming um uh series of events which uh onward will be holding on um housing uh in which we are going to get our in-house um economic superbrain Tim lock who some of you may have heard of uh if haven’t um he’s advisor to multiple chancellors

Of the exer very well known in Westminster he’s going to be interviewing a number um of of experts on all things housing looking at the kind of the rough demographics of this room probably the most important economic issue for most of us here so look out for more details of that when

It um comes along do follow um onward on Twitter uh and as I say subscribe to our mailing list and hopefully we’ll see you all again at the next can I do one very quick one more thing um onward create streets Nicholas’s organization uh and organization called Labor together next

Friday are co-hosting a conference specifically on this issue of the social fabric called restitch putting together people like Ben anel who delivered the wreath lectures this year Tom tuen har the security minister Steve Reed The Shadow environment secretary all talking about community and white matters it’s

In centry for a day there are still places um so if you would like to come along find one of the onward team uh and it will all be online and all streamed so there’ll be lots of these sorts conversations happening there thank you very much everyone than you thank you very much